“Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, ‘This is how you shall bless the children of Israel.’ You shall tell them,
The priests shall bless the people of Israel daily
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
דַּבֵּר אֶל־אַהֲרֹן וְאֶל־בָּנָיו לֵאמֹר כֹּה תְּבָרֲכוּ אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אָמוֹר לָהֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצוה הכהנים לברך את ישראל והוא אמרו יתעלה כה תברכו את בני ישראל. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו בפרק אחרון ממגילה ותענית ובשביעי ממסכת סוטה. (נשא את ראש, אהבה הלכות תפלה וברכת כהנים פי"ד):
That is that He commanded the priests to bless Israel. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "Thus shall you bless the people of Israel." And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in the last chapter of Megillah and of Taanit and in the seventh chapter of Tractate Sotah. (See Parashat Nasso; Mishneh Torah, Prayer and the Priestly Blessing 14).
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a ritual instruction
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 1QS 2:2-4 reinterpreted it
- 1QSb (1Q28b) reinterpreted it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Numbers Rabbah 11:1-7 expanded it homiletically
- Sifre Numbers §39-43 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.212 carried a parallel the passage treats daily prayer and thanksgiving generally; the specific connection to Birkat Kohanim is inferential rather than explicit
The New Testament
- Luke 1:21-22 carried a parallel Zechariah the priest delays in the sanctuary while the crowd awaits the blessing; the connection to the priestly blessing rite is inferred rather than stated in the text
- 2 Corinthians 13:14 reinterpreted it the tripartite benediction is sometimes read as a Christianized echo of the threefold priestly formula, though this connection is speculative and not a scholarly consensus
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- ugaritic texts West Semitic 'face' (pnm) idioms provide broader cognate background for the Priestly Blessing's 'face-shining' and 'face-lifting' language; the closest direct formulaic parallels ('shining/turning of the face' as a sign of divine favor) are more securely attested in Akkadian, with the Ugaritic material supplying general West Semitic background rather than verbatim parallels Relationship to the parallel: common ancestor Ugaritic divine-face and blessing formulae in the Baal Cycle and Kirta epic (KTU 1.14–1.16; 1.4–1.6) Smith and Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, 2 vols (Brill, 1994, 2009); Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 2002)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.